Syrian authorities ban the iPhone

It appears that Syrian authorities are now banning the use of iPhones in their country, seemingly due to activist use of the device to upload violent scenes to web sharing services such as YouTube. While the iPhone as a fast electronic news gathering and viral news tool is well known and well established but this is the first time we've seen only the iPhone banned in a country.

The government has already banned several types of social media use after protests started in January of this past year and over 4,000 have been killed. The authorities believe social media apparently has an impact. One activist has this to say -

“It is enough for any tourist or guest visiting Syria to own an iPhone to be a spy suspect.”

Reader comments

Syrian authorities ban the iPhone

the power of the smartphones in bringing helping bring down these dictators can not be understated. As an Arab who has family living in both egypt and syria I can tell you that these revoultions would not have happened without the ability to have a mini computer in your pocket to instantly update and upload videos of these butchers doing there thing. Anybody who who doesn't believe that the pen is mightier than the sword need only look at the arab spring and it's use of smartphones to know that it's true

That just sounds retarded, it's just is easy to upload viral videos with android as it is for iphone. Hell even with the dying webOS back when it was 1.4.5.1 it was just a couple taps after recording. Google in cahoots with some tyrannical dictators I am still laughing.